“I hope you’re well and business is going OK, amazingly it’s been over a year now since I built my P1800 and it’s still going strong. Even now I’m still finding new ways of getting different tones out of it. The cabinet design is pretty simple, almost entirely in birch plywood, mostly using 1″ but 1/2″ in some areas where necessary. Grille fabric is very similar to one Marshall used for a time. As you can clearly see, it’s a (very open-backed!) combo, but I’ve given the speaker a long cable and used a 1/4” jack to allow it to be plugged into another amp head. Likewise the P1800 could obviously be plugged into another cab.“I hope that you like the design. It was always intended to look minimal and indeed the cabinet didn’t cost much at all, especially as the wood was spare from constructing our kitchen worktops so essentially free! The other main feature I was going for was to make the whole thing look quite lightweight, although I realise it’s harder to see from the photos I’ve given you. Essentially the grille appears to float off the floor by an inch or so, and the amp just sits above it seemingly unsupported. Quite the opposite of real life as the thing is stupidly heavy!
“Feel free to add it to your gallery – it’s a lovely collection of amps and must be particularly good for you to go back through and see how people have taken the same basic design but added their own spin. Whilst I like the look of those who have replicated an old Marshall-style head, I always prefer doing something different. After all, it’s so hard to make a replica that does justice to the original that I think going in a completely different direction with clear objectives is not only more achievable but also makes you tackle the problem differently. Push the boundaries and all that.”
